George Habash

George Habash (2 August 1926-26 January 2008) was the founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist group, serving as its Secretary-General from December 1967 to July 2000, preceding Abu Ali Mustafa.

Biography
George Habash was born on 2 August 1926 in Lod, Mandatory Palestine to an Orthodox Christian family of Palestinians. He was a medical student at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon, and his sister was killed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, and Habash and his family went into exile as refugees after the war. He ran a clinic in Amman with Wadie Haddad and worked at Jordanian refugee camps, and the two of them agreed that Israel should be destroyed by any means possible. Habash founded the Arab Nationalist Movement in 1951, and in 1958 he fled to Syria after being implicated in the failed coup in Jordan. In 1967, after Gamal Abdel Nasser's popularity waned following Egypt's defeat in the Six-Day War, Habash founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in place of the Nasserist ANM. This group was a communist terrorist group, and it sought to replace Israel and Palestine with one single, secular, non-denominational state. Unfortunately, Ahmed Jibril split with the group to form the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command, while Nayef Hawatmeh and Yasser Abed Rabbo formed the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). He stayed neutral during the Lebanese Civil War, but he rejected the Oslo Accords, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and PFLP formed the Rejectionist Front to oppose a two-state solution. In the late 1990s, his health worsened, and in 2000 he resigned as Secretary-General, and Abu Ali Mustapha replaced him. He died on 26 January 2008 in Amman, and President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority had flags flown at half-mast.